I’ll admit it: I’m no good at waiting. Waiting gives me anxiety. What if it never happens? What if I miss it? What if what I’m waiting for is the worst thing in the world? I don’t think I’m alone on that: we as a society are terrible at waiting. We want to get rich quick, have everything our own way now, and if it’s not now, we want to see the manager! Waiting is fine for other people, but really not for us.
But we know that waiting is a spiritual discipline. Our Church Year begins anew on the First Sunday of Advent, that season that prepares us for Christmas, the coming of our Lord as one of us. This time of year, we remember on the new year that God renewed the covenant with us, his people, his creation, and that in this new covenant, he is creating the world anew. But that doesn’t happen all at once; we have to wait for it to come to completion, and we have to cooperate with its happening.
And so, this new year of the Church finds us waiting. That might be tough, but I think for many of us, the idea of a new year is welcome. For many people, a year gone past can have brought more than enough of the “anxieties of daily life” that our Lord speaks of in today’s Gospel. Maybe we’re more than happy to usher the current year of grace out the door, and look for more grace in the year to come.
I think it’s pretty easy to see why this is so needed. I like to watch the news in the morning, but lately it doesn’t take too long before I have to turn it off. The bad news can be oppressive sometimes. And we could even look to our own lives. As we come to the end of the year, maybe this was a year filled with blessing or maybe it’s one we won’t miss. Most likely, it was a little bit of both. Perhaps this last year might have seen the death of a loved one, the ending of a relationship, or some other significant event. As we end another year, some of us might be doing that with some regret, looking back on patterns of sin or the plague of addiction. And so, for many of us, maybe even most of us, it doesn’t take too much imagination to know that there is a lot of room for renewed hope in our lives. We literally can’t wait for things to change.
But wait we must, and that’s a hard pill to swallow. If we can’t wait for Thanksgiving to be over before we go Christmas shopping, it’s going to be hard to wait to see what God is doing in our lives. There’s a scene in the movie “Christmas Vacation” that I always think of when I read these readings. Clark Griswold is in his boss’s office, bringing him a Christmas gift. There’s an awkward silence and then the boss tells Clark that he’s very busy. He picks up the phone and says, presumably to his secretary, “Get me somebody. Anybody. And get me somebody while I’m waiting!” None of us likes to wait.
So we have to find the grace in the waiting. Maybe that’s why I love Advent so much. I’m so generally impatient, that Advent has me slow down and re-create that space so that it can be filled with our Lord’s most merciful presence. So what do we do while we are waiting? How do we live among the chaos? How do we keep going when every fiber of our being wants to pack it in and hope for it all to be over real soon? Today’s Gospel warns us that people will die in fright when they see what is going to happen, but it cannot be so for people of faith. Even in the midst of life’s darkest moments, even when it seems like we can’t withstand one more bout of hopeless worry, we are still called to be a hopeful people. “Stand erect,” Jesus tells us, “and raise your heads because your redemption is at hand.” God is unfolding his promise among us and even though we still must suffer the sadness that life can sometimes bring us, we have hope for something greater from the one whose promises never go unfulfilled.
Then what does a hopeful people do while we are waiting for the fulfillment of God’s promises? How is it that we anticipate and look for the coming of our Savior in glory? Our consumerist society would have us cast aside our Thanksgiving dinners to get an early jump on Black Friday, and battle it out with a few thousand of our closest friends for the latest and greatest deals. And to that kind of thinking, Jesus says, “Beware that your hearts do not become drowsy from carousing and drunkenness and the anxieties of daily life.” Getting caught up in the things of this world does us no good. It does not bring us closer to salvation or to our God, and all it does is increase our anxiety. Who needs that?
Instead, we people of faith are called to wait by being “vigilant at all times.” We are called to forgive those who have wronged us, to reach out to the poor and the vulnerable, to advocate for just laws, laws that protect religious freedom and the sanctity of human life from conception to natural death, and to protect all those who are most vulnerable; to challenge world powers to pursue true justice and real peace, to give of ourselves so that those in need might have Christmas too, and even to love those who drive us nuts sometimes. When we do that, we might just be surprised how often we see Jesus among us in our lives, in our families and schools and workplaces and communities. It might just seem like Jesus isn’t that far from returning after all, that God’s promises are absolutely unfolding before our eyes.
We are a people who like instant gratification and hate to wait for something good to come along. Maybe that’s why the Christmas shopping season starts about two months before Halloween. But if we would wait with faith and vigilance, if we would truly pursue the reign of God instead of just assuming it will be served up to us on a silver platter, if we spend our time encouraging others with the hope we have in Jesus, we might not be so weary of waiting after all. That’s the call God gives us people of faith on this New Year’s day.
One of my favorite reflections on this hope that we have comes in the Advent hymn, “O Come, Divine Messiah.” It goes like this:
O come, divine Messiah;
The world in silence waits the day
When hope shall sing its triumph
And sadness flee away.
Dear Savior, haste! Come, come to earth.
Dispel the night and show your face,
and bid us hail the dawn of grace.
O come, divine Messiah;
the world in silence waits the day
when hope shall sing its triumph
and sadness flee away.
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